1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer software and, more particularly to educational software, and even more particularly to software for creating worksheets.
2. Description of Related Art
In today's education system, classroom curriculums and lesson plans are becoming more challenging and time consuming to construct year after year. Parents ask teachers to make themselves available to students after school and off-hours to assist them with lessons. Meanwhile, school budget cuts force reduction in the number of teachers assistants and reduce time spent between students and teachers. Teachers are faced with higher education achievement goals each school year, but due to the increasing demands on their time, the likelihood of achieving those goals decreases.
One problem that confronts many teachers is the lack of a tool allowing them to create practice worksheets, tests, and quizzes for students dynamically and quickly. Each of these worksheets requires an adequate amount of time from the teacher to generate and review. However, with their services at a high demand, and student to teacher ratio rising, spare time for teachers is limited.
Typically teachers will receive lesson plans from textbook publishers. However, some teachers prefer not to use the material and would rather create their own. Furthermore, some of the textbook material is not covered or reviewed during the school year, thus, some modification to the worksheets are warranted. Since some worksheets are hard copied, they can easily get misplaced and storing them can be difficult. Furthermore, some worksheets that are on electronic media do not allow the flexibility to remove or modify problems. However, there are times when teachers need to add questions to or remove questions from the worksheet, but are unable to do so due to the lack of flexibility of the electronic media.
Usually a limited quantity of worksheets accompany the textbooks for individual chapter/units. If the students completed the worksheets and require additional practice on a chapter, teachers are required to create these themselves. In addition, many of the schools do not leverage other teachers' existing home-made practice problems who are also part of the same school district. It would be nice to have a process where teachers can review other teachers' worksheets within the same district to minimize time necessity of generating new tests, quizzes or homework problems.
Also missing in many schools is the ability for proactive students seeking additional practice problems to find extra problems and complete them at their own convenience. When students need additional help, they must contact their teacher and ask for such problems. The time for the student to request such material and for the teacher to generate such material can reach a couple days.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a tool that allows students quick access to additional homework problems with instant results, allows teachers to minimize time to generate tests/quizzes/homework worksheets, and allows teachers within a district to leverage and pool common questions in a repository. Furthermore, it would be desirable to have a solution to creation of tests/quizzes/homework worksheets that reduces the administrative tasks at hand for creating worksheets and allows teachers to spend more time one on one with students.